Candlemas (A Poem)

The crowd comes to gather the darkness.

No light to their wicks has yet sprung.

The church doors allow them no entry.

The night is no longer so young.

Face spreads to face a grey pallor.

No mouth to an ear spreads a lie.

Years upon years mark the aged.

In darkness, they ready to die.

Yet hark! Now a spark among tinder!

Yet see! Now a flame doth arise!

Its light, now a color ‘midst pallor!

Its warmth, now a shine in their eyes!

Now candles light, one to another!

The flaming bright, miming the sun!

Face looks to face, sees a brother!

Hope, with the fire, has won!

For Christ has now entered the temple,

And the Holy of Holies revealed!

The veil is now torn for the priesthood,

The crowd opens doors to be healed!

Glory to God in the highest,

For the people have longed to be free!

Glory to Father, Son, Spirit,

One God and one Lord, Trinity.

Ron Dicianni: "Simeon's Moment"

This is War

I'll admit, my life is extremely bland. I sit here both watching TV, listening to music, and typing this post. I should be doing my homework: I have a four page paper due on Monday, and I know I won't have much time to do it tomorrow. I'm tired, yet I don't want to go to bed. I know what I must do, yet I consistently find that I lack the willpower to do it.

I spend my free time watching movies about real men, Secondhand Lions, Gran Torino, or The Dark Knight, movies that I love, movies that I try to learn from, movies whose beauty I admire, yet with all of my admiration for the manly virtues shown, I don't act with one damn one of them. I sit and watch movies or mess around on Facebook, and I don't do my homework when I'm supposed to, more obsessed with comfort than duty.

It's the final two weeks of High School for me, and the pressure is on. Coupled with this is a schedule of work every day until Friday this week.

How many times I have fallen asleep praying the Rosary, I will not say.

But that's just the point: I must admit both the need for my work to be done, and my own ability to do it. So, I ask myself, what's stopping me? Weariness? Maybe. Indifference? No, definitely not.
...Fear? Oh Hell yes.
When it comes down to it, I -our Generation as a whole, I think- desperately fear the pain it takes to make the right decision. We fear that in giving all we've got to give, we may be spent. We fear that we may not be enough. We fear, not dying to ourselves, but dying of ourselves. We fear that our adversary may slay us.

To this fear, there is but one reply:

Photo by: http://zimaq.deviantart.com

We may tire, we may slack off, we may whine. But this does not change the fact that This is War.

In this life, in this war between work and weariness, it's kill or be killed. There is no middle option in which we may do nothing. Either our weariness will overcome us and we will slack off, or we will man up, pull ourselves up by the bootstraps, and Get. Things. Done. 

Do I fear the triumph of weariness? Yes, of course. But it is this fear that I may break down that drives me on, because it is only if I triumph over weariness that I will ever escape it. And it will never be easy.

But then again, welcome to the Spiritual Life. Nobody ever said it would be easy...

...just that it would be won.

Joy is Impenetrable

The difference between a Christian and a non-Christian, it seems, is not whether or not we acknowledge that Christ lived and died, not in whether or not we ever stand at His tomb. The way I see it, our life consists of the moment between when Christ gains life anew, and when the stone is rolled away. We, as humanity, wait at this tomb during our short lives, whether as faithful disciples, or as soldiers who simply got the short straw. Our lives are centered on that quiet moment before the dawn, that lull before the storm, whether we realize it or not.

No, the difference between a Christian and a non-Christian is Attitude.

Pope Francis, in his homily on Palm Sunday, stated it thus:

Do not be men and women of sadness: a Christian can never be sad! Never give way to discouragement! Ours is not a joy that comes from having many possessions, but it comes from having encountered a Person, Jesus, who is among us. It comes from knowing that with him we are never alone, even at difficult moments, even when our life’s journey comes up against problems and obstacles that seem insurmountable, and there are so many of them!

As a Christian, our wait at the tomb is characterized by joyful expectation of a new life, by the recognition that it is Christ Jesus that is behind that stone, and furthermore, that he is very much alive! A Christian recognizes Christ alive in the form of bread at Mass. A Christian recognizes Christ alive in the tomb of every heart that receives Him. That is a Christian attitude: that we wait at the tomb, but in the joyful expectation that this tomb will soon be found empty of death, that our deaths will soon be conquered and our lives will be restored by a risen Christ.

A Christian, then, is characterized by joy. The difference between a Christian and a non-Christian is Joy. We, as Christians, must always remember what our Pope has said, that "A Christian can never be sad!"

However, this is not to say that a Christian must always be necessarily happy. We Christians tend to be a rather somber bunch sometimes. After all, what is Lent? We fast and pray with a solemness that verges on sadness, but is not. No, a Christian is never necessarily happy. Rather, a Christian is joyful, and that is entirely different. Joy, readers, is simply the knowledge that one is loved. And knowledge is justified, true, belief.

Christians are joyful: We believe that God loves us, and we know this to be true because we have seen Christ's death, and this love has been justified in this death, realized in Christ's death. How many times have we heard, after all, John 3:16?

For God so loved the world, that He gave his only Son...

It is not happiness that drives us on, as Christians. Ours is a war of light and dark, of sadness and joy. It is the knowledge that we are loved, the knowledge that God loves us enough that drives us on. The Christian ideal is that joy, this knowledge that we are loved, would drive all our actions, that it would realize Jesus' command:

A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.

This Joy, readers, is impenetrable. For we have won the war, this we know. We are now simply waiting for the enemy to surrender. This is our joy. And if we were to hold this joy in our hearts and minds every second of every day, we would be Saints.

Let us try.

Photo by: http://blog.sion.hr/assets/images/401_h.jpg

Happy Feast of the Divine Mercy!

This Blog as a Celebration

Photo by: www.catholicmemes.com 

Tonight was the celebration of (basically) the Mass of all Masses: the Easter Vigil. As I was serving at Mass, in between the complications of Altar Serving at such a great and long occasion, I realized how much I love Easter Vigil. Even with off-key chanting by deacons, awkward improvisations, crowded Altars full of catechumens, finding thrown away baptismal candles, or my own distracted mind, the Vigil was so amazing that it's joy cannot be compared, in my mind, with any other celebration in the Church.
For me, the Mass every Sunday will remind me of the Vigil, not the other way around. That is its heart: that, every Sunday, we celebrate the day between Christ's sorrowful death and his joyful resurrection in an hour.

Our communion with Christ, during the Mass and during our whole life, is not primarily, I think, one of union with Him on the cross, nor is it union with Him on his resurrection day, but rather it is a communion of waiting, of patient, somber, accompaniment. St. Paul said in one of the (many) readings today that:

"We were indeed buried with him through baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might live in newness of life."
~Romans 6:4

If we were born again into Christ's death through our Baptism, and if we live "in the hope of the Resurrection" after death, then our whole life consists of our adoration of Christ entombed. Christ, through the Eucharist, is entombed in our hearts; just as he is hidden -yet alive- behind stone, so is he hidden -yet alive- behind the forms of bread and wine. 

And this is simply something, celebrated most centrally on Holy Saturday, that we keep coming back to every Sunday of the Year.


This blog of mine, yet new, is, for me, a channel for the graces that God has showered upon me, the philosophical beauties that are sometimes realized, or the poetic thoughts given to me by beauty, or the hardness of war that is begotten by the absence of beauty. It is something, like Holy Saturday, that I keep coming back to.
That, dear reader, is the meaning of celebration. Celebration, in its root form, is originally from the Mass, is from the Latin celebratus meaning "much-frequented; kept solemn" (courtesy of www.etymonline.com).
Through this blog, I intend to elaborate that which I much-frequent, that solemnity which I keep coming back to, which I find that I cannot live without.

Easter is here, my friends, Easter is here.

"At nightfall, weeping enters in, but with the dawn comes rejoicing"
~Psalm 30: 6